The Cornbread Gospels (34 page)

S
ERVES
4
TO
6

This spoonbread’s roots are old and unpretentious: Leftover cooked rice (either plain or “Spanish”) is required. With plain rice, this becomes a pleasing neutral starch dish, nice anywhere you’d serve potatoes or cooked grains. If you use a leftover seasoned rice, it anchors a Mexican, Tex-Mex, or South American–style meal perfectly. Try it with chili or any pot of spicy beans ladled over it. Add a dab of sour cream, a sprinkle of cilantro, a spoonful of salsa, sliced avocado, and you are good to go. Flan for dessert, of course.

Vegetable oil cooking spray

¼ cup stone-ground yellow cornmeal

1 teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon baking soda

2 tablespoons butter, melted and cooled

2 eggs

2 cups buttermilk

1 cup cooked leftover rice, either plain white, Spanish, or brown

1.
Preheat the oven to 325°F. Spray an 8-inch square baking pan, preferably glass, with oil, and set aside.

2.
Combine the cornmeal, salt, and baking soda in a small bowl. Set aside.

3.
Combine the melted butter, eggs, and buttermilk in a larger bowl and whisk them together well.

4.
Pour the dry mixture into the wet, and stir all together. Stir in the cooked rice and transfer the mixture to the prepared baking dish.

5.
Bake until firmed, puffy, and nicely browned, 50 to 55 minutes.

S
ERVES
4
AS AN ENTRÉE,
6
AS A SIDE DISH

My friend Ronni Lundy, to whom I’ve referred throughout this book, makes a simple, classic pudding–style spoonbread: “just company cornbread all gussied up and in its Sunday best,” as she says. Her recipe is unusual because the batter gets a long (ten-minute!) beating just before it goes into the pan. Here’s my adaptation.

Vegetable oil cooking spray

3 cups low-fat milk

1¼ cups stone-ground yellow or white cornmeal

1 teaspoon salt

3 eggs

2 tablespoons butter

1¾ teaspoons baking powder

1.
Preheat the oven to 400°F. Spray a 10-inch cast-iron skillet with oil and set aside.

2.
Bring the milk to a boil in a medium saucepan, preferably nonstick. Gradually pour in the cornmeal with one hand, whisking with the other, creating a very thick mixture. Lower the heat and add the salt. Continue cooking over low heat, stirring almost constantly, for about 2 minutes. The mush will be very thick. Let cool for 10 to 15 minutes.

3.
Toward the end of the mush-cooling time, beat the eggs in a large bowl on high speed until well blended, foamy, and paler, 2 minutes. Place the butter in the prepared skillet and put the skillet in the oven to melt the butter.

4.
Transfer the cooled mush to the bowl containing the beaten eggs, and sprinkle in the baking powder. Remove the skillet from the oven and carefully pour the melted butter into the batter, leaving just a bit in the skillet. Now begins the long beating: 10 minutes at medium speed, pausing to scrape the sides of the bowl. The batter will be thick and creamy.

5.
Transfer the batter to the buttered skillet. Bake until golden brown, 25 to 30 minutes. Serve at once, hot from the oven.

• • • • • • • • • •

Cornbreads began on a griddle, for open fire came long before the oven. Although that griddle might have been a flat, hot stone or the side of a long-handled hoe held over an open fire, these flat breads—tortillas, hoecakes, jonnycakes, and a host of other mostly unleavened griddled cakes—were the ancestors of today’s light, leavened pancakes. Americans have enjoyed the latter over the last 200 years, since the invention of quick leaveners like baking powder (prior to this, pancakes were leavened with either yeast or beaten egg whites).

But plain or embellished, simple or complex, thick or thin, a crepe or a pocketed waffle: all are griddled, distinctive, and worthy of a place at the table.

A place, perhaps, especially at the family table. Is there a child alive who doesn’t adore pancakes? They’re special, not-for-every-day food. They’re excellent absorbent carriers for syrup. They’re fun to eat, stacked (and you can watch the butter melt between the layers), and they’re round. Round, that is, unless you’re an exceptionally lucky child whose mother, father, big brother or sister, even babysitter might have dripped the batter carefully into bunnies or initials … yours. In a time and place where the loss of shared mealtime is epidemic, family pancake-making is as much about creating relationship and ritual as it is about making food. An inherently lingered-over breakfast item, pancakes mean that someone is standing there dipping and flipping, asking those at the table, “How many more do you think you want?”

Some forms of griddled cakes certainly do find their ways into other meals, occasions, and relationships. The elegant crepe, represented on
page 234
as Wanda’s Soft Corn Crepes, is lovely dinner fare, filled with anything from a stir-fry of chile-laced vegetables to shredded, well-seasoned chicken and mushrooms, then sauced appropriately. Want to impress at a first-home-cooked-meal-for-new-boyfriend-or-girlfriend? For dessert, fill these same tender crepes (batter made in advance) with sautéed bananas or sliced fresh strawberries, and flame with a little rum or brandy.

The conversational intercourse of daily life, the way that, starting in childhood, continuing through friendship, dating, mating, and aging wisely and well, we begin and continue weaving together our participation in the human race, is subtle, ongoing, full of color and variety … as are griddled cakes themselves, round as life.

As we Americans learn our way into the healthy, delicious world of whole grains, griddled cakes are a terrific place to experiment with the flavors and textures of different, new-to-us flours … you know, the ones we’re always being advised to eat but rarely do or even know how to. Griddled cakes reach new heights of interest, flavor, and texture when they incorporate corn. Whether it appears as meal (white, yellow, blue) as in White Cornmeal Griddle Cakes Old Alabam’ (
page 209
), as kernels (fresh off the cob, frozen, even hominy) as in “Last Rows of Summer” Waffles (
page 223
), or as masa harina (again see
Wanda’s Soft Corn Crepes
), corn, in its many forms, adds dimension.

Griddled cakes’ interest quotient expands on several other counts. We’ve mentioned crepes, wrapped around an infinite number of sweet or savory fillings. But, less highfalutin traditional American–style pancakes can also have an amazing nightlife: Add chopped vegetables to the batter and stack the cakes, sometimes with a little grated cheese between them, and serve not with syrup but with … soy sauce. Fast! Amazing! Healthful! Yeah, it sounds improbable, but try it once, and you’ll be a convert.

Then there are the infinitely versatile lacy-thin Newport–style jonnycakes (
page 224
), which can do triple duty as a starter (topped with chopped heirloom tomatoes, fresh basil, and coarse salt), as a side (cozying up to a bowl of spicy corn chowder), and as a dessert (with sliced seasonal lightly sweetened strawberries and real whipped cream—in my view, better than traditional strawberry shortcake any day). And if ever there was a Sunday-night supper dish to look forward to, wouldn’t waffles stake the claim? Try the sesame-embellished ones from your own homemade mix (
page 212
); you’ll be glad the mix is copious, because you’ll go through it
fast.

Breakfast, dinner; sweet, savory; embellished, plain: there is a place and time, on the palate, menu, and table, for the simple and the elaborate, in corn-centered griddled cakes as in everything else. To everything, as Ecclesiastes reminds us, there is a season. And as Joni Mitchell wrote and sang, it’s “Both Sides Now.” Anything griddled has two sides, a front and a back, and a certain amount of flipping over is involved. Which, I think, applies not only to what we eat, but to who we are and were and will become. Life and griddle cakes: circular.

Come; let’s circumambulate the round world of griddle cakes together.